Bone growth has been a goal of bone graft surgery for since the early 1900's. Many bone graft materials have been designed in an effort to restore the skeleton to normal form and function. Recently bone graft surgery has been attempted to reshape bone in an effort to improve esthetics. The design of bone graft materials has focused on providing a bone graft material that would stimulate the host to regenerate lost bone or actually replace the lost bone with a synthetic substitute. Many bone graft surgeries use autografts taking bone form one part of the body to be used in another part of the same patient. Other bone graft surgeries use allografts using bone from another member of the same species most often harvested form cadavers. Zenografts are composed of hard tissue from another species such as coral or cow bone. Recent years have seen the development of synthetic bone graft materials most of which are composed of calcium phosphate based compounds designed to fill the bony defect. Synthetic bone grafts are designed to permit the body of the host to grow into the graft site and encompass the synthetic bone graft material or resorb the synthetic bone graft material and replace the bone graft with host bone. The ideal bone graft material would not have to be harvested from another site and would stimulate host bone formation to repair the defect. This invention embodies a bone graft material that stimulates osteoblasts and inhibits osteoclasts resulting in a net increase in bone over other current methods.
Over the years various methods and materials have been devised to limit the amount of alveolar bone lost after a tooth is removed. However, all of these methods have required a surgical procedure where incisions are made and a flap is raised to release the surrounding gingiva in order to cover the socket and bone graft. The procedure required a barrier be placed over the graft but under the gingiva to contain the bone graft that filled the socket. The procedure required the use of a bone graft material, subgingival barriers and a surgical procedure to place the material. This invention introduces a novel method that requires no surgical procedure other than tooth removal. The surrounding gingiva and underlying alveolar bone is undisturbed and a subgingival barrier is not required.